It starts with a whisper.

Soft at first, barely more than breath, words curling in the dim light of your bedroom. I have listened to you sleep—to your murmurs and your dreams, to the small sighs and restless kicks against tangled sheets. But this is different.

This is not dreaming.

This is speaking.

Your fingers toy with the hem of your blanket, twisting fabric around tiny hands as you glance toward the empty space beside you. Your voice lifts, hushed, secretive. A question, a giggle. A response to something that wasn’t said.

Your mother finds it charming. She smiles as she watches you chatter to no one at breakfast, as you pause between bites like you are listening to something only you can hear.

Your father does not find it charming.

“They need real friends,” he mutters over the rim of his coffee cup. “They’re not a baby anymore.”

He says it with an air of dismissal. Like it’s all an inconvenience.

But I wonder if he’s right, maybe you do need a friend.

You don’t seem lonely—at least not to me. You laugh, you play, you share your thoughts with the empty air as easily as I pass through the walls they fall deaf on. But I know loneliness. I know the way it seeps into the floorboards, the way it lingers in the silence between shouts, the way it festers in the spaces where no one looks.

And so, I listen.

I do not know who you believe you are speaking to, but I want to believe it is me.

I hover when you whisper secrets, when you tell stories, when you lean in like you are waiting for a reply. I watch the way your small hands gesture in conversation, the way your head tilts—comprehending some unspoken word you’ve just heard.

When you laugh, I stir the air, just enough to brush against your skin.

When you ask a question, I answer, even though you can’t hear.

Someday, you will stop. You will outgrow this. You will let go of the empty spaces and the silence, and this game—if it is a game—will be over for you.

But for now, I stay close.

Just in case you need a friend.